"Peter F. Hamilton - A Quantum murder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

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CHAPTER ONE

It was the third Thursday in January, and after a fortnight
of daily drizzles the first real storm of England's monsoon
season was due to arrive sometime in the late afternoon.
The necklace of Earth Resource platforms which the Event
Horizon corporation maintained in low Earth orbit had observed the storm forming out in the
Atlantic west of Portugal for the last two days: the clash of air fronts, the favourable
combination of temperature and humidity. Multi-spectrum photon amps tracked the tormented
streamers of cloud as they streaked towards England, building in power, in ve1ocity~ The satellite
channels bad started issuing the Meteorological Office warnings on the breakfast 'casts. Right
across the country, in urban and rural areas alike, people were hurrying to secure their property
and homes, lead animals to shelter, and protect the crops and groves.
Had the Earth Resource platforms focused on the county of Rutland as the dawn rose, any observer
would have been drawn to the eastern boundary, where the vast Y-shaped reservoir of Rutland Water
was reflecting a splendid coronal shimmer of rose-gold sunlight back up into the sky. The
Hambleton peninsula protruded from the reservoir like a surfaced whale, four kilometres long, one
wide. Hambleton Wood was sprawled across a third of the southern slope, its oak and ash trees
killed off by the torrid year-long heat of the Warming which had replaced the old seasons. The
rotting trunks were now besieged by a tangled canopy of creepers and ivy, carrion plants feeding
off the muichy bark of the once sturdy giants they choked. Another, smaller, expired copse lay
broken on the northern side, adding to the general impression of decay. But a good half of the
remaining farmland had been converted to citrus groves, sprouting a vigorous green patina of life.
The peninsula was an ideal location to grow fruit; Rutland Water provided unlimited irrigation
water
2 PETER F. HAMILTON


during the parched summer months. Hambleton itself, a hamlet of stone houses with a beautiful
little church and one pub, nestled on the western side, the whale's tail, above a narrow spit of
land which linked it with the Vale of Catmose. There was a single road running precariously along
the peninsular spine; grass and weeds nibbling away at the edges of the tarmac had reduced it to a
barely navigable strip.
At quarter-past nine in the morning, Corry Furness turned off the road a kilometre past Hambleton,
freewheeling his mountain bike down the sloping track to the Mandel farmhouse, tyres slipping
dangerously on the damp moss and loose limestone.
Greg Mandel caught a glimpse of the lad from the corner of his eye, a slash of colour skidding
down the last twenty metres of the slope into the farmyard, clutching frantically at the brakes.
Greg had been out in the field since half-past seven, planting nearly thirty tall saplings of gene-
tailored lime trees in the sodden earth, binding them to two-metre-high stakes which he hoped
would given them enough anchorage to withstand the storms. When it was finished the lime grove
would cover half a hectare of the ground between the farmhouse and the eastern edge of Hambleton
Wood. The planting should have been safely completed a week ago, but the saplings had arrived late
from the nursery, and the mechanical digger he was using had developed a hydraulic fault that took
him a day to fix. He still bad two hundred trees left to put in.
Greg had thought his early start would give him enough rime to finish at least fifty before lunch:
he was already resigned to carting the rest into the barn until the storm passed. Fit watching
Corry barely miss the side of the barn, then shout urgently at Eleanor who was painting the ground-